by Kuriakose Saju
Do you hate traffic jams? I’ve come to realise the perfect answer to road rage lies in blow-em-ups. You’re really tired after a long day at the office and all you want to do is get back home and unwind in front of the TV with a cold beer. But no! You have to put up with endless lines of cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic, making the five-minute drive into a fifty-minute one. Now, if you were given the option of ramming your way through, blowing up everyone and everything in sight, without facing dire legal or ethical consequences, wouldn’t you take it? Hell yeah, you would! And that’s precisely what this game is all about. In one word, go CRAAZY!
With over 8,000 objects on every track to destroy and given each car (of the 48 models you can sample) is made up of almost 20,000 polygons design-wise, the graphics in this game are bloody amazing. You get to play as 12 different characters, racing each other across 39 tracks in six different environments for the title of FlatOut Ultimate Champion.
So how’s gameplay? The first couple of times, you’re still in kind of awe of everything blowing up around you while you’re racing. There are petrol pump explosions, crumbling tunnels, fellow drivers being ricocheted out of their cars… and somehow, amidst all the madness, you have to come out on top. After a while, you should get used to your ride and be taking the curves like a pro! With smooth graphics, lifelike environs and a hard rock soundtrack for you to pulverise your enemies to, venting your frustration takes on a whole new meaning. And when you fell the racing is getting a bit too much, you can always chill out with a variety of suicidal mini games. For example, there’s one where the object of the game is to send your driver catapulting out the front window as high as possible. And there’s the classic bomb run where you have to keep passing a bomb to your opponent and make sure the timer doesn’t run out on you.
“Take destruction to a new level of bone-breaking carnage” – that’s the tagline of Flat Out: Ultimate Carnage. Does it live up to it? I’d say an unequivocal yes! This one is like Carmageddon Extreme. The drawbacks? You’re going to need an extremely jazzed out machine to play this one. Basic requirements include at least 2 GB RAM with a Dual Core processor and 4.7 GB free space, no to mention a dedicated graphics card in the lines of Nvidia’s GeForce 7600 or ATI’s X1800. It’s been a week since the Windows version has been released in India (the game released in the US on 10/2/2007) and I, for one, have been busy blowing up other cars and drivers and feeling pretty damn good about it. From the stables of Empire Interactive, the Windows version is available at Rs 999, making it a perfect value-for-money buy!
Leave a Reply